For fans of elite curling in Sudbury, there is seldom a lack of top-end talent to follow, each and every year, as rinks across a whole variety of age categories begin their quest towards national glory.

And while that is definitely the case again for the 2018-19 season, few teams will garner as much attention as the Tanner Horgan quartet, as well as the Curl Sudbury junior women’s crew skipped by Kira Brunton.

That latter grouping returns with the same lineup from one year ago, with Megan Smith at vice, Sara Guy at second, and Kate Sherry at lead for Team Brunton. Both Sherry and Brunton were new to the team last fall, replacing the tandem of Krysta Burns and Laura Masters, both of whom had aged out.

This year will mark another transition, as both Smith and Guy graduate from the U21 ranks come next April or so.

“We’re really hoping to have a good last year together,” noted Brunton, contacted in Kitchener-Waterloo, site of the ice-breaking U21 Royal Slam by Venue.

“This weekend is going to be our first tournament together, so we’re going to try a few new things, a few new pre-game and post-game routines, and hopefully get a really good start to the season.”

There was much to be learned in 2017-18, with some shuffling within the original lineup, and plenty of time set aside for team building exercises.

Fair to say the young women find themselves at least a few steps ahead of the game as they prepare for a very busy month of September that also finds the team competing at the Stu Sells Classic at Leaside Curling Club in Toronto, Sept. 14-16, and the Navy Fall Classic at the Royal Canadian Navy Curling Club in Ottawa, Sept. 28-30.

“With the new team last year, we really tried to become more similar, whether that’s in terms of release or routines or whatever, because everyone was coming from a different background,” said Smith, entering her fourth year of biomedical biology studies at Laurentian University. “This year, it just seems that it’s a little easier to fine-tune things, because we’re already that much closer. We’re excited to just focus on that in the first half of the season.”

And so the season begins, with plenty of questions to be answered over the course of the next few months.

“I think most of the teams this weekend are new formations of strong teams from last year,” explained Brunton.“It’s going to be interesting to see how everything goes this weekend. There’s a few teams from the States coming up that we haven’t really seen before, so we’re excited to play those teams.”

While coach Rodney Guy and the Brunton rink want to make sure that the season is an enjoyable one, there are clearly not oblivious to the fact that the NOCA Junior Women’s Championship, captured by Hailey Beaudry of Thunder Bay last season, snapped a four-year string of Sudbury mastery, and marked only the second time in a span of 13 years when the Northern Ontario colours were not donned by a local rink at nationals.

“We’ve definitely talked about how we don’t want to talk about the pressure,”said Brunton with a laugh.“We all know that we want to have fun, we all know that we want to win, so we’re just putting our best foot forward to do those things.”

For the likes of Tanner Horgan and company, the pressure is almost inevitably part of the mix, a by-product of the success that he and his local foursomes have enjoyed in years gone by. And while the junior men’s crew of Jacob and Tanner Horgan, Max Cull and Maxime Blais will go into the U21 playdowns as heavy favourites, there is far more intrigue to be had in the Men’s Open version of the team.

For those events, southern Ontario veteran Mark Kean slides in to replace Cull, the very lineup that took part in the Oakville Fall Classic, posting a 2-2 record last weekend.

“As with any new team, there are some bugs to figure out as we go,”said Horgan. “I thought we played three pretty good games, two of which we won, and the other one we lost in a close game to the Americans.”

While many folks can understand the new to focus on building team chemistry, getting a real feel for how the various personalities will interact, Horgan suggested that there is more to dealing with lineup changes than simply that.

“Curling would be more similar to basketball and hockey, for instance, than dissimilar,”he said.“There might not be quite as much purely instinctive reaction, but a typical rock takes about 30 seconds to travel the ice, which means there is a play that happens in that 30 seconds, with a whole lot going on.”

“If I am throwing, for instance, once I release the rock, there is a lot of instinct on the part of the sweepers, looking at the release. But Mark, in the house, might be looking for something specific in my release, and if he just hasn’t played with me for that long, he could be fooled by it a little bit. It will take some time for Mark to learn, or for me, looking at Mark, to figure out exactly how our rock will run down the ice.”

As for the takeaways that the Horgan rink will carry into the Stu Sells Oakville Tankard this weekend, the Laurentian University student remains quite optimistic.

“There are a lot of positives to pull out from our first event, even if we didn’t get the results that we wanted,”said Horgan.“I think it would have been depressing to see us play four games at a consistently mediocre level.

“I think that it’s promising to know that we can put together solid performances.”

Not to mention that it’s exciting for the fans in Sudbury who love to follow their local curlers.